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For some reason, financial advisers don’t seem to feature in the ranking by Oxford academics of 700 occupations likeliest to be eliminated by technology. They should have been near the top.

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Robo advisers have the edge over their human counterparts

In March, a programme developed by Google’s DeepMind beat one of the world’s best players of Go, the ancient Chinese board game. Go is so complicated that no computer had ever beaten a top-ranked human player before. Lee Sedol was humiliated 4-1.

If a computer can master Go, which has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, how hard can it be to teach one to give financial advice?

A sceptic would say you can never replace the human element because all clients are different. So they are. But their financial circumstances don’t have that many variables. Certainly fewer than the atoms in the universe.

Nor are you looking for good judgment. Or you shouldn’t be. Good financial judgment is rare and very expensive. What you want is a few simple rules and the facts.

Yet, in my experience at any rate, even expensive financial advisers are less good at their game than Sedol is at his.

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So “robo advice” is a very promising solution to the advice gap at the bottom of the market that the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority identified in a recent report. It’s a shame they didn’t provide a few more concrete suggestions for encouraging it, rather than kicking many of the issues into the long grass. But it’s coming anyway. And not just in the cheap seats.

One City chief executive, who employs a lot of financial advisers, predicts it will quickly go up the wealth scale. And he thinks it’s very bad news for human financial advisers who should be considering occupations less at risk from automation. “It will be great for customers but what about the advisers? They can’t all retrain as vicars or podiatrists.”